The Pilot sat upright in his seat, with his arms resting parallel to each other on the limbs of the monumental chair. His eyes would have been staring out of the ship’s cockpit, but they were closed in a sleep-like, machine-induced trance. Intricate wiring was attached to his helmet and suit, keeping him fed, hydrated, and mentally comfortable. The wires led to complex machines that whirred and beeped in the otherwise silent ship. The only other sounds that could be heard were the occasional rattling of the hull against the complete silence of the darkness and negative matter beyond its walls.
In the Pilot’s head, a new dream formed just as the last one crumbled away. The passage of his time asleep was both endless and instant; he had lived a thousand lives in a thousand worlds. Dreams, reality, time and distance blended into a bewildering, contradictory mess that decimated any sense of self in his brain. It was such an exponential amount of dreaming, that the Pilot’s first real original life was buried far beneath whatever he experienced in his sleep.
The ship pushed forward through space, and with each light year it passed, it repaired and expanded upon itself. Small, automated, insectile machines scurried along the ship’s outer surface and inner bowels, maintaining, fixing, replacing, welding, and patching. When nothing else could be fixed, they found something to improve, and when nothing could improve, they found something to change. They first made alterations to the ship’s engines, ensuring the craft would reach its destination accurately. Next, they improved the shielding of the hull, so no unexpected collisions would damage it. They even made aesthetic changes, pointless rooms and additional compartments, all based on their own personal robotic tastes.
Eventually, the machines noticed problems inside the Pilot’s body; he was still degrading slowly as he slept. They scanned him from head to toe and analyzed every possible flaw. The Pilot dying would negatively affect the overall health of the ship, and these machines would not allow that. They began to include the Pilot in their refurbishing protocols. They fastened nerves to critical functions of the ship through special wires of their own creation. Organs were gradually replaced with more efficient mechanical versions of themselves. When the machines themselves were physically incapable of building something, they built another machine that could. The army of tiny workers chipped away at every inch of the Pilot’s body, meticulously intertwining organic material with the ship’s titanium hull. He continued to dream through it all, as they soared across space.
…
The ship’s computer sent a pulse of electricity into the brainstem that served as the center of the room. The Pilot awoke to a blurry view of a faintly red planet with dim rings around it. He could see text appearing that contained information about the world, and a large message of “Destination Reached” flashed across his eyes. Confused and unsure of who he was, he attempted to stand up, but he felt nothing. He tried to look down at his legs, but his eyes would not move from the planet. He ferociously shook himself to break loose of whatever grip he was in, and the entire ship jerked forward abruptly. He tried to move again, more gently this time, and the vessel turned slightly. Panic took him. He was certain he had a mouth once, but his screams never came out.
He drifted there, uncertain of what he had become. There was once a man with a goal and a destination. A man who left his home for a reason. The cameras on the front of the ship pointed out into the starry abyss, and he wondered if he could ever die like this, and be gone when the ship’s power gives out, or float here awake and bodiless forever.
Story Notes
I wrote this after reading about the Artemis II mission, specifically how the astronauts were in a flying spaceship for nine days. I can barely handle a 3-hour car ride, so I was amazed not only by the scale and distance of their travel, but their mental fortitude to sit through it.
It got me thinking about the ridiculous existential dread that would come with being in space for too long, and this story is questioning the whole idea that humans could ever do that.
Thomas Mazzaferro 